QMI Agency

French researchers say a woman is more likely to give you her number after listening to romantic music.

In a study looking at 18 to 20-year-old single women, Nicolas Gueguen and Celine Jacob from the Universite de Bretagne-Sud, along with Lubomir Lamy from Universite de Paris-Sud, asked 87 women to sit in a waiting room with music playing in the background.

The women were then asked to move into a different room where an experimenter asked each woman and a young man — the "average" guy — about two food products.

The experimenter would leave the room to give the young man a chance to ask the woman out.

"My name is Antoine, as you know, I think you are very nice and I was wondering if you would give me your phone number. I'll phone you later and we can have a drink together somewhere next week," the young man was instructed to tell each woman.

If there was a love song playing in the waiting room, Antoine's chances of getting a woman's number doubled — 52% of participants responded to his advances, compared to only 28% of those who had heard the so-called neutral song.

The romantic song was French songwriter's Francis Cabrel's “Je l'aime a mourir" (I love her to death). The neutral song was “L'heure de the” (Tea time) by Vincent Delerm.

A separate group of young women rated 12 young male volunteers on their attractiveness, and the researchers picked the one rated closest to average to help with the experiment.

"Our results confirm that the effect of exposure to media content is not limited to violence and could have the potential to influence a high spectrum of behaviour," Gueguen said in a release. "The results are interesting for scientists who work on the effect of background music on individuals' behaviour."